Tasks from daily community roundtable sessions

Once http://plus.google.com becomes more than just invite-only, I would love to see Gwibber integration (in the form of an installable .deb of a plugin) for it... Hopefully when the Google+ API comes out, it would be much easier...

Goals for the Ubuntu Women UDS-P cycle Add your ideas here for consideration in this formal blueprint: http://wiki.ubuntu-women.org/Roadmap-P

Harvest hasn't seen much development recently, but we still need a good place to summarise all the needed work in the distribution. Problems both in representation and data should be discussed.

Tuesday roundtable

Discuss and implement in Ubuntu a framework for generating dkms packages from a driver source tarball. The framework makes it easier to create an maintain dkms packages by automating many of the mechanical tasks currently required by dkms.

FreeRDP and Remmina to replace rdesktop, vinagre and tsclient

Topics: - Discuss what would be interesting to support at u-boot - Extend PXE support? - USB booting? - Splash/display support? - What might help the Ubuntu server team?

During Ubuntu installation or oem-config firstboot, if a network is present then add an additional step in the workflow to either enter Ubuntu One credentials or to sign up for a free account.

Wednesday

With rapid release now a reality in Oneiric and presumably in Precise, we should discuss the potential impact of updates that can affect people that were just expecting security updates, but getting a whole lot more (new features and potentially breaking stuff that used to work). After this session, a clear path forward for supporting the existing LTS and Precise should be established and documented.

Discussion and action items coming from UDS-P for the direction and development of the LoCo Team Portal during the "P" Cycle This to discuss: Bug #878593

P-cycle discussion of the master git tree maintenance

The Nokia Qt team wants to reach out to designers to showcase the QtQuick software and the power of QML to design UIs sharing the same toolset with developers.

today ubuntu-core is actually the most minimal OS you need to run apt-get, there is no root password, no user or any other configuration in place on the core images ... this confuses users that want to use -core as a minimal development environment. target of this spec is to give users something in hand to easier make use of ubuntu-core, collect certain typical usecases and document what needs to be done to turn -core into a proper rootfs for these cases.

Thursday

With 11.10 we released a localized image for China. This image contained many customizations to make Ubuntu more appealing to users in China. This included significantly improving support in CJK languages, adding gwibber plugins for services popular in China etc. There are still some improvements that can be done to cary this work forward for our Chinese community.

Meeting of release team to do some brainstorming on things to be improved in next cycle.

Addressing concerns from community members about (lack of) involvement in user experience and design, and concern from designers that they only have time to work on a tiny fraction of the Ubuntu user experience (in the shell). Exploring practical steps we can take, so interests get paired to tasks, and the whole user experience of the distro is improved.

In the real world there are always going to be failures, triggered by things like software bugs, hardware failures and misconfiguration. Ubuntu should where possible handle common failures and provide predictable feedback to the user that the system is broken.

Friday

For USB-based mobile broadband modems it got common that the Windows driver is stored on the modem itself and as long as the driver is not installed the modem shows itself to the computer as a USB mass storage device. Therefore usb-modeswitch got introduced to switch these modems into modem modeunder Linux as there the driver is already available as a kernel module shipped with the OS. A similar problem occured now for USB printers, they also show themselves as mass storage devices by default to provide their Windows driver without need of a CD. So usb-modeswitch needs to be extended to printers Tests should be done whether the switching mechanisms are the same as for modems and only the printer's IDs need to be added or whether more work is needed.

What can we do to drive MOTU this cycle? What sprints should we aim for?

treach Darkwing how to package

Care has been taken over the years to ensure that clicking a link to an executable on a website doesn't cause untrusted code to be run, and that all package downloads from the Ubuntu archive and from PPAs can be done securely. But lots of community and third-party documentation directs users to download unsigned .debs from websites and install them, and software center facilitates this. We need to examine the security around third-party packages.